The Crunch: As companies try to gather more data — to enhance the consumer experience and their bottom lines — they often end up with disconnected solutions that negatively affect customer service. Voicent is a communications company that consolidates the information from those disparate channels — sales, marketing, and customer service — in one CRM, allowing businesses to be in sync with consumers. The company’s comprehensive cloud platform, Voicent Live, provides agents with complete customer profiles during calls and unearths data from voice channels. Voicent is also working on ways to automate the process through AI and machine learning to both enhance insights and allow businesses to streamline communications.

Retailers often rely on different tools to manage voice communications, customer service, marketing, and sales. These disparate solutions also have to integrate with a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform to create a complete picture of the customer journey and provide guidance on future engagement channels.

That fragmentation, or siloing, of information can be a strain on a retailer’s infrastructure, causing important insights to be missed. And the disconnect between data, voice systems, and tools most often impacts customer service.

“The biggest challenge many SMBs have is choosing tools from different vendors, and none of the tools are data-centric. If you look at communication solutions, most are just to answer calls,” said Joe Wu, Founder and CEO of Voicent.

Voicent is a cloud communications solution that offers businesses an all-in-one alternative to piecing various tools together. The Voicent Live cloud platform combines call solutions with service, sales, and marketing functionalities through a built-in CRM — or integrates with a company’s legacy CRM.

“We are the only solution in the market that has CRM and communication tools fully integrated into a single platform,” Joe said.

Voicent’s innovative solutions bring all of those channels together in one voice platform. Which means even SMBs can run an enterprise-grade business phone system that boosts customer satisfaction and leaves no sales opportunity behind.

Customer Information Delivered to the Right Person at the Right Time

When an associate answers a call — whether it is in-store or at a call center — the clock starts ticking. The goal is to satisfy that customer’s need as quickly as possible, but when information is siloed, connecting data points becomes time-consuming.

With Voicent’s integrated call center CRM, customer information is automatically retrieved and presented to the person taking the call. The technology displays the customer’s entire engagement history with the brand, and the call itself is recorded as another data point.

“If I talk to a customer with his or her CRM record in front of me, and I make a sale, I can click a button to send you a text message with confirmation numbers automatically. That is the advantage of an integrated platform.” — Joe Wu, Founder and CEO of Voicent

“In the old days, the screen pop-up used to tell you the basics: a name and a phone number. But, with Voicent, that pop-up is your CRM record and post-engagement tools,” Joe told us.

Those post-interaction tools can be just as important to a company’s bottom line. Prompt outreach after a call enhances the customer experience, whether it is a follow-up email or a reminder and notification by phone and text. Voicent Live automates all of those processes.

“If I talk to a customer with his or her CRM record in front of me, and I make a sale, I can click a button to send you a text message with confirmation numbers automatically,” Joe said. “That is the advantage of an integrated platform.”

Integrated CRM Manages Contacts, Collects Leads, and Boosts Sales

The CRM goes beyond just collecting and displaying customer information. It helps sales and marketing teams gather the data they need to boost productivity — all in one place.

“If you work in sales or marketing, every tool requires integrations or some special IT,” Joe said. “Voicent has all the functions they need, and we have a built-in CRM integrated with all of them — all in a singular platform.”

Marketing departments have access to customer histories, preferences, and the tools to engage with each in the same cloud platform. One useful tool is built-in email campaign functionality to help businesses stay in touch with consumers by sending them timely, relevant offers.

When customers engage with a campaign, it is tracked as part of their journey, and can even be used to provide the sales team with higher quality leads. Potential customers can enter the sales pipeline from many different channels — including phone, email, and physical store. Voicent consolidates those disparate data points into a unified list of sales leads for agents.

Those capabilities mean more informed and relevant interactions between consumers and brands, whether that’s an SMB with in-house customer support or a larger company with a dedicated call center.

But companies with legacy systems and deeply entrenched CRMs can also integrate their current systems seamlessly with Voicent. The company offers open APIs for integration with other CRMs and has built modules for popular systems — like Salesforce, Zoho, and SugarCRM.

A Voice Platform that Analyzes Data and Keeps Consumers Engaged

Voice communications are at the heart of Voicent Live’s data-gathering process. The platform not only provides the information associates need to help customers over the phone but also the tools to gather data on those calls — from any device.

Businesses can use that information to understand customers better and to improve efficiencies in their own operations.

“Many data points are recorded through the platform. With Voicent, you can use the analytics based on the CRM, but you also have lots of reports that show you how effective your communications are,” Joe said. “For example, if your agents work for eight hours, but four of those hours are spent waiting for phone calls, then you know something isn’t quite right.”

Voicent Live is accessible from most devices, allowing businesses to gather insights from anywhere.

Users can also add custom fields to the CRM to track business specific metrics, and the platform includes social media integration out of the box. Voicent makes sure that, if a customer calls a company, that information is automatically tracked by the CRM, and an engagement plan is executed seamlessly.

Businesses can customize their features with Voicent Live, selecting from a line of CRM tools, inbound systems like voicemail, outbound voice systems, two-way texting with customers, email solutions and workflow automation tools.

And as technology advances, Voicent continues to innovate ways to make its products smarter and more effective for businesses.

Applying AI and Machine Learning to Further Evolve the Product Line

Businesses rely on voice communications to serve customers, but when there’s a disconnect between sales, service, and marketing channels, the consumer experience suffers. Voicent brings all of those channels together — with a built-in CRM — to better serve customers, keeping them satisfied and engaged well after a call.

And the company is focused on automating that process by using AI to analyze data, allowing clients — whether it’s an insurance sales or a financial service business — to make informed decisions about marketing and sales strategies even more quickly.

“Our current focus is on artificial intelligence and machine learning because it will help our cloud customers improve sales and customer service,” Joe said. “For a company to use AI in customer service and sales, you need data for the AI to analyze and you also need the tools to implement what you discovered. In that sense, we are well-positioned to take advantage of those technologies.”

Voicent Live helps ensure that customers are satisfied and businesses have all of the data they need to grow their bottom lines. It all starts with voice communications, but companies can now connect their sales pipelines, marketing departments, and CRM — in a single voice platform.

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Jon McDonald is a contributing editor for DealCrunch with over 15 years of experience editing, writing, and designing at numerous publications. His passions include digging into emerging trends and seeking out the companies making an impact on the retail industry.

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